The Pentagon's New Map

The CSMonitor reviews the new book by Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Barnett attempts to provide a new analytical framework for understanding geopolitics in the 21st century. The reviewer describes the thesis:

As the 21st century opens, Barnett suggests, the world is divided not between good and evil or "clashing civilizations," but between the connected and the disconnected, between globalization's "functioning Core" and the "non-integrating Gap." The good news is that the age of wars between states is over and roughly two-thirds of humankind - despite great disparities in wealth, health, education, and political rights - now live in the connected parts of the globe. The bad news is that only the US can shrink the Gap. Only the US can make globalization truly global.

Barnett explained his concept of the Core and the Gap in an Esquire article last year:

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and--most important--the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

I haven't read Barnett's book yet, but his thesis seems sound. Basically, he argues that the industrialised world needs to engage failed and rogue states more closely, as the more ties a nation has with the rest of the globe, the more stable it becomes:

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the two strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

This country has successfully exported security to globalization's Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle East have been inconsistent--in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

The idea that globalization ends war and creates stability is not new, but Barnett provides a new structure with which to understand it